I Do Not Heart Monsanto or Corporate Greed!

Almost 2 hours of my day today was spent watching 'The World According to Monsanto' -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH4OwBYDQe8
and feeling pretty sick about it.  I try to be a positive person, but it's hard to watch the stuff that's going on in India and Mexico and now right here in the good 'ole US of A and not feel really angry about corporate greed and the impact it has on all of us, but especially the poor of the world.  Some of the damage I contribute to as a US citizen really hurts my heart.  So now I have to decide what to do with this information.  Where do we go from here?  If you just sit back and look at these big picture stories, like the polar bear mom whose baby died because she had to swim so far looking for ice and just couldn't make it any longer; all the plastic particles that are now everywhere in every part of everything we do, eat, breathe, etc.;  and now Roundup Ready alfalfa takes over the world.....it all feels a little overwhelming, doesn't it?  I think my conclusion today is that it is overwhelming.  These are times that I just have to turn to my faith to carry me through.  There are no easy answers.  The best I can do is my personal best, one step at a time, day by day, spreading (non-GM) seeds and hoping they take root and grow, learning from others and trying to find the love in this world.  That's the optimist in me.  Here comes the pessimist....
This video was an eye-opener for me because I realized how many things I am just naive about and don't even begin to know about.  There are lots of Americans just like me.  We live in a little bubble not even realizing all of the things that are going on around us until they hit us right in the nose.  That's the life I wish we could all have, though....the simple life.  When did everything get so complicated?  It wasn't good enough to drink the milk of a cow, we had to inject her with all kinds of hormones until she got mastitis and then administer antibiotics to heal the mastitis, so now we have pus, antibiotics and igF1 (a hormone, I think?) in our milk....and the best part is that if we didn't purposely try to find out about it, we might never have even known!?!  And that milk is probably not killing us, but think about it and think about all of the bad things that it IS doing.  Is it worth it?  The milk is just one tiny example, a drop in the bucket.  I think about my grandparents and how hard they worked to put food on the table and how they grew gardens to nourish their families.  Is there anybody in the world that dreams of feeding their kids pus?  antibiotics?  hormones?  toxins?  I have to say that I'm really disappointed in our government for constantly giving in to corporate greed and putting profits ahead of people.  When will we learn?  Why does it seem like the simplest things are often the hardest to understand?

My Plastic-Free Life's Show Us Your (Plastic) Trash Challenge

Happy New Year!!!

I've been saving my plastic trash for a while now, but never really tallying it up or documenting it, so in an attempt to make myself analyze it a little more this year, I'm going to take Beth Terry's (My Plastic-Free Life) challenge.  If you want to join me, the link is here:
http://myplasticfreelife.com/showyourplastic/challenge-show-us-your-plastic-trash/

Let me know if you're taking the challenge and what impact it makes on your life.

For some reason, my calling in life revolves around trash!  It's been a focal point in my life for a long time and I'm finally coming back around to it.  I used to save candy wrappers in my bedroom as a child because I thought they were too pretty to be thrown away.  I saved a lot of things like that, always wondering why we used things one time and then 'got rid' of them....where did they all end up?  So here I am in my 30's (almost 40's!) and thinking about trash consumes a lot of the time I spend on this earth.  When I found out how much food is thrown away each year in the U.S., it really astounded me, so I started to take a look at our food waste and what we could do about it.  We started composting and I can happily say we've cut our food waste down to almost nothing.  I just ordered some worms to try vermicomposting, so I'll do a whole entry on composting one of these days.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that thinking about (and actually analyzing) what we're doing is usually a good way to make a change (or decide that you like the way everything is going and stay the same).  Yes, life is short and it does take time to do things like this, but I think the time spent is worth it if it produces helpful results.  So, who's with me? :)